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Excited to announce Retrium — distributed retrospectives made easy

For the past few months, I’ve been hard at work in my spare time on a startup in the agile/scrum space. Along with my co-founder, Ryan Detweiler, I am very excited to reveal it to the world (or, at least to those select few who actually read this blog!). It’s called Retrium — and it’s a tool that makes sprint retrospectives easy and effective for distributed scrum teams.

Here’s why we’re building it. If you’ve ever worked on a team that uses the scrum framework, then you probably know all about sprint retrospectives. Most likely, you’ve been exposed to retrospective facilitation techniques like 4Ls, Lean Coffee, The Wheel, or Mad/Sad/Glad (no? you should try them!). Here’s the problem: all of these techniques require flipcharts, sticky notes, markers, and other physical tools. While that’s fine and dandy for collocated teams, geographically distributed teams are left out in the cold. That’s where Retrium comes in. We want to bring the power of these retrospective techniques to distributed teams.

Here’s what it is. Retrium is a set of super-simple interfaces to some of the most popular retrospective techniques. It is completely device independent, so you can use your phone, tablet, or desktop to participate. Retrium is also a facilitator that guides you through the retrospective itself. Don’t know how to run Lean Coffee? Don’t worry, Retrium takes care of that for you. Finally, Retrium doesn’t try to do too much. It isn’t intended to replace video conferencing, it merely complements it. In fact, we recommend you run a video conference while you run a Retrium-powered retrospective.

Here’s our timeline. We are aiming to launch our MVP in the summer. In the meantime, in good lean startup fashion, we have a pretty landing page with a place to enter your email if you’re interested in hearing more.

So that’s it. If this resonates with you, reach out and get in touch! Please email me so we can schedule a time to chat.